We the undersigned believe that the single-sided printing requirement for the Graduate School of the Environment (GSE) MSc Thesis must change. The University of East London, who accredit the MSc AEES course were contacted to enquire about the rationale behind the requirement to print single-sided. UEL state that the GSE can set their own rules. Why would an organisation with a sustainable ethos make each student use twice as much paper than is necessary? GSE’s position is that single-side printing is necessary due to problems of legibility. GSE stated that “We wish to have all theses printed in a single-sided format as this is preferred by the assessors, when theses are printed on both sides, very often the text is illegible on one side when an image is printed on the other side“. We (the undersigned) feel that the quality of printing is the responsibility of the student submitting the thesis and we will accept having our papers rejected if they are illegible. When pressing the GSE for a more valid reason, the only response was that they “do not see any reason to change their requirements for printing” and “they have been drawn up for good reasons”.  Why can't those reasons not be made public? Courses run by the GSE aim to give students the knowledge to promote sustainability and effect change in the built environment. As such, we believe the GSE should be proactively initiating ways to reduce the impact that running and delivering the course has on the environment. Shouldn’t such an organisation be actively developing ‘alternative technologies’ to avoid the wasteful use of trees? We feel the requirement is archaic and irrelevant since printing high quality documents double-sided has become standard industry practice, without interfering with legibility. We wish the GSE to change the single sided printing rule.

Thank you.

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